The "first time here" banner on some sites has gotten out of hand. See here:

I've been using SE sites for long enough to know that the few pixels poking down from the banner belong to the "log in" link, but a newish user probably wouldn't. And good luck finding the FAQ, about page, SE dropdown, &c. I know, there's a "close this banner" box, but it's not very conspicuous, and we probably don't want to be making users' lives more annoying anyways. Can there be a cap on the length/size of these banner messages?

PS There's a grammatical error in the banner text, but in the interest of keeping distinct issues separate, I'll post that as a separate question in a moment. EDIT: here it is.

PPS For those keeping score at home, I have now fulfilled my campaign promise to provide a freehand circle with a freehand drop shadow.

1 Answer
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I don't get the behaviour that you describe. I have tested this in Chrome, FireFox & IE9 (Yep 9!) and they all look like this:

It must be to do with screen resolution?

I really can't see your point about closing the box - I mean the [X] is pretty big.

I think a better suggestion would be for the box to just fade out after 10-15 seconds. That way you have displayed a message to user and given them a chance to act on it. If they don't then the box will disappear and they will have to fend for themselves so to speak.